Calibration of a Different Field-of-view Stereo Camera System using an Embedded Checkerboard Pattern

Knowing the correct relative pose between cameras is considered as the first and foremost important step in a stereo camera system. It has been of the interest in many computer vision related experiments. Much work has been introduced for stereo systems with relatively common field-of-views; where a few number of advanced feature points-based methods have been presented for partially overlapping field-of-view systems. In this paper, we propose a new, yet simplified, method to calibrate a partially overlapping field-of-view heterogeneous stereo camera system using a specially designed embedded planar checkerboard pattern. The embedded pattern is a combination of two differently colored planar patterns with different checker sizes. The heterogeneous camera system comprises a lower focal length wide-angle camera and a higher focal length conventional narrow-angle camera. Relative pose between the cameras is calculated by multiplying transformation matrices. Our proposed method becomes a decent alternative to many advanced feature-based techniques. We show the robustness of our method through re-projection error and comparing point difference values in ’Y’ axis in image rectification results.